| Excerpts from |
| Canine DNA Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Human DNA |
| Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin |
| Under the subheading "Thinking about what Animals Can Do, Not What They Can't, " Ms. Grandlin writes: "You always hear that humans domesticated animals, that we turned wolves into dogs. But new research shows that wolves probably domesticated people, too. Humans co-evolved with wolves; we changed them and they changed us." She goes on to quote a study conducted by Robert K. Wayne at UCLA. Canine bones found buried with humans only date back some 14,000 years; however, Wayne's study shows that dogs separated from wolves around 135,000 years ago. He believes the reason one does find dogs with humans earlier than 14,000 years ago is that the canines associating with man at this time were in fact much more wolf like than the dogs we have today. When one looks at the fossil record, sure enough wolf bones are found close to humans. Ms. Grandlin continues "If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were together at the point when homo spaiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus. When wolves and humans first joined together people only had a few rough tools to their name, and they lived in very small nomadic bands that probably weren't any more socially complicated than a band of chimpanzees." She goes on to say, "This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company they were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since." A group of Australian antropologists have taken this idea one step further. They believed that we "learned to act and think like wolves. Wolves hunted in groups; humans didn't. Wolves had complex social structures; humans didn't. Wolves had loyal same-sex and non kin friendships; humans probably didn't, judging by the lack of same sex and nonkin friendships in every other primate species today. (The main relationship for chimpanzees is parent-child.) Wolves were highly territorial; humans probably weren't---again, judging by how nonterritorial all other primates are today. "By the time these early people became truly modern, they had learned to do all these wolfie things. When you think about how different we are from other primates, you see how doglike we are. A lot of things that we do that the other primates don't are dog things. The Australian group thinks it was the dogs who showed us how." The Australian group further believes that we survived while Neanderthal failed because of our relationship with wolves. Paul Tacon of the Australian Museum relates that "cultural evolution is based on cooperation, and humans learned from dogs how to cooperate with people they aren't related to." Ms. Grandlin writes that wolves probably even changed the structure of our brains. He relates that as a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller because it doesn't need as many skills to survive. "The dog's brain shrank 10 to 30 percent." 10,000 years ago, our brains began to shrink as well. "In all of the domestic animals the forebrain, which hold the frontal lobes, and the corpus callosum, which is the connecting tissue between the two sides of the of the brain shrank. But in humans it was the midbrain, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller while the corpus callosum and the forebrain stayed pretty much the same. Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory tasks. Dogs and people coevolved and became even better partners, allies, and friends." What does that mean for us today, "Dogs make us human." Mis Grandlin concludes, People were animals, too, once, and when we turned into human beings we gave something up. Being close to animals brings some of it back." |
If we are what we are today because of Dogs,
don't we owe them an obligation?
Read:
Nathan Winograd's
Redemption
"This book will open your eyes
to the SPCA's role in the death
of thousands of healthy dogs."
Redemption is the story of animal sheltering in the
United States, a movement that was born of
compassion and then lost its way. It is the story of
the “No Kill” movement, which says we can and
must stop the killing. It is about heroes and villains,
betrayal and redemption. And it is about a social
movement as noble and just as those that have
come before. But most of all, it is a story about
believing in the community and trusting in the
power of compassion.
don't we owe them an obligation?
Read:
Nathan Winograd's
Redemption
"This book will open your eyes
to the SPCA's role in the death
of thousands of healthy dogs."
Redemption is the story of animal sheltering in the
United States, a movement that was born of
compassion and then lost its way. It is the story of
the “No Kill” movement, which says we can and
must stop the killing. It is about heroes and villains,
betrayal and redemption. And it is about a social
movement as noble and just as those that have
come before. But most of all, it is a story about
believing in the community and trusting in the
power of compassion.
| Books by Temple Grandlin One of the best books I have ever read. |
| Marta Williams says every human can intuitively communicate with animals, we just have to learn how. |
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